The Words That Mean Goodbye
by heavenlyshadows
Summary: The worst day of loving someone is the day that you lose them.


Clary pulled her jacket tighter around herself as the wind blew fat, white snowflakes in her face. She was barely a block away from Magnus and Alec's loft where she had been babysitting Max and Rafael when the demon attacked, swatting her off the sidewalk and into the street, her head clipping the curb as she fell. She moved to stand but fell back against the asphalt when she found the world around her spinning at an alarming speed.

Before she could reach for her seraph blade, the demon grabbed her by her hair and yanked her upwards, so close to its face she could feel its rancid breath on her cheek and sank its teeth into her neck. She couldn't hold back the scream that escaped her lips

 _No,_ she admonished herself. _You're a Shadowhunter. Shadowhunters don't cry out in pain._

But the agony was unbearable.

All she could do was lie on the pavement, unmoving, as the demon dropped her and ran, disappearing back into the shadows, watching as the snow continued to fall around her as though nothing had happened, turning a gruesome red rather than white.

White.

It was what they would wear to her funeral. Her friends, her family, everyone she was leaving behind. For a brief moment, she wondered what they would say, if they would cry. Her parents would. Her mother would stand near Clary's body and announce her name to the funeral goers as all families of fallen Shadowhunters did and sob into Luke's shoulder when it was finally over. Clary knew Luke would try to be strong for her mother, that he would go somewhere to deal with his grief alone. He would be angry because even though he was her father in every way that mattered, the Clave wouldn't allow him to stand with her mother when she read the rights. Because he and Clary didn't share blood.

She knew that Simon would probably leave, unable to bear saying goodbye to yet another friend. Losing Jordan had been hard, losing George had been harder, but losing Clary...That would be enough to destroy him. But he wouldn't be alone, Clary knew that too. He would have Izzy, and Magnus, and Jace.

Jace.

Her death would hit him the hardest, pulling him back towards the lonely, angry person he had been when they first met. A boy who believed that to love was to destroy and to be loved was to be destroyed. She would have given anything to tell him not to go back to that person, to tell him to love and allow himself to be loved again, but she wasn't sure if she would get that chance. She wasn't sure when the world began to blur, or when Alec appeared beside her, his eyes gazing down at her in concern and fear. It was almost funny, she thought. She never would have imagined that she would consider the boy who had slammed her against the wall of the Institute and threatened her to be one of her best friends.

"Clary? Clary, can you hear me?" His voice was muffled as though she were hearing it from underwater and she fought to say something, anything, but the words wouldn't come out. Alec pursed his lips in concentration as he pulled his stele from his belt and began to draw an iratze along the pale skin of her collarbone. After a moment, the hope that had been in his eyes faded and Clary knew.

It hadn't worked.

The realization fell on her chest like a weight. It wasn't supposed to end like this. She was supposed to have more time.

Alec swore under his breath and moved his arms under her knees and shoulders, lifting her off the ground as carefully as possible and breaking into a run. Clary hissed with every step he took, the movement jostling her body in a way that sent pain rippling through her, and he mumbled a breathless 'sorry' before kicking the door to the loft open, revealing a startled Magnus.

"Alexander, what…." He gasped as he caught sight of Clary in Alec's arms. "Oh my God, Biscuit! What happened?" Alec followed Magnus to a spare bedroom and placed Clary on the bed, turning to his boyfriend with a desperate expression. "There was a demon, it bit her and the iratze I drew didn't work," he paused and took a deep breath, though it didn't seem to ease his panic."You have to fix her, please."Magnus was already kneeling beside the bed, his fingers sparkling blue as they trailed over her torn and bloody skin. "Call Jace," Magnus spoke quietly, not looking at his boyfriend, who only nodded and left, the door closing partially behind him. Clary could vaguely hear him talking on the phone in a rushed voice and she caught bits and pieces of the conversation as he relayed what happened to Jace. "Demon….Clary….apartment….Simon."

At the mention of her parabatai's name, her heart squeezed painfully in her chest. He probably already knew. He would have felt it. Even without the runes that bonded them together, he would have known, because Simon always knew. Clary thought of Jem, who had spent nearly a century without his parabatai and still felt the pain of his loss as if he had gone yesterday.

That would be Simons life now. Trying to find a way to live without his other half, knowing that the person who knew him better than anyone, who had been there his entire life, now only existed in his memory.

Clary's thoughts were interrupted by Magnus, who had fallen against the chair behind him with a sound somewhere between a sigh and a sob. Pain was etched in the lines of his face, and he looked not only exhausted but defeated, glitter-laced tears streaming down his cheeks. "I'm so sorry." His voice was barely a whisper and she squeezed his hand weakly. "It's ok. You did everything you could." Alec came back into the room then, and his face fell. Clary could see that he was trying to deny it, refusing to believe that it was real. But he knew as well as she did that there was no denying it.

"There's nothing you can…." Magnus cut him off with a shake of his head. "All we can do now is wait." Alec sighed and closed his eyes, leaning on the doorframe as though he needed support, before coming to sit and take her small hand in his scarred one. It wasn't until he sat down that she realized he was crying too, and again she thought of the boy who had once hated her. The same boy who, years later, was weeping for her as she died.

They stayed like that, the three of them, until they heard the door to the loft open and Jace, Simon, and Isabelle came running in, Luke and Jocelyn close behind. Alec and Magnus stood and allowed Jace and Simon to take their places on either side of her. Their eyes, the warm brown and fierce gold she had always found such love and comfort in, roamed over her body, taking in the blood and shortness of her breath, the lack of color in her skin.

Simon looked up at Magnus, almost pleading with him. "And there's….there's nothing you can do? You can't stop it, nothing?" He spoke so fast that the words were almost unintelligible, but the pain in them was clear. Magnus shook his head solemnly. There were times when the warlock appeared to Clary as both very old and very young all at once, his face displaying a pain so raw it was as though he were experiencing death for the first time but his eyes telling a centuries-old story that said death was something he knew all too well. "She isn't in any pain, that's all I can do for her."

"But the Silent Brothers…." Jocelyn said. "Clary won't survive the trip. And even if we called on them now, they wouldn't get here in time." Magnus looked at Clary in dismay. "But there has to be something…." This time it was Clary's turn to cut Jocelyn off. "Mom, stop. Arguing won't fix anything." Hearing how broken and frail her daughter sounded, Jocelyn's eyes filled with tears and her hand flew to her mouth in an attempt to muffle the sob that flew from her throat. "Oh Clary…." Clary remembered years ago, when they had all been in a situation similar to this, watching helplessly as Jocelyn's oldest child had died. They had all felt her pain as she wept over the child she had lost, not just once but twice, the child she had never had a chance to love. But that was a hell dimension that Jonathan had trapped them in. Jonathan had done a lot of terrible things to get him where he was.

This was different.

Clary was the one who always saw the best in people, who ran headfirst into dangerous situations without any regard to her own safety if it meant protecting the people she loved. Clary was the hero.

And the hero wasn't supposed to die at the end of the story.

 _Everything happens for a reason._ It was something Maryse had said to Jace often when he was younger, when he was anxious or afraid. _Everything happens for a reason._ But even knowing that, even after spending almost his entire life believing it, Jace couldn't find a reason for this. They were supposed to have time. They were supposed to have a whole future ahead of them and die when they were old and gray. Before meeting Clary, he never would have imagined that would be his future, let alone that he would want it. He had always detested the idea of a dull, mundane death, wanting to die heroically in battle as many Shadowhunters did. But now that he had found Clary, someone he could see spending the rest of his life with, he couldn't imagine wanting anything else. Maybe that was what made this as painful as it was. The longer he sat, watching as the love of his life died, the more he watched the hopes he had for their future disappear.

It was only him and Clary now. Everyone had moved into the other room, and Jace could hear the low murmuring of their voices through the closed door, could hear Jocelyn sobbing as Luke did his best to hide his own tears.

It was sometimes hard for Jace to remember that Luke wasn't Clary's biological father. He had known her for her entire life, had been there for everything, had loved her in a way that Valentine never had. He, Simon, and Jocelyn had been, for the first fifteen years of Clary's life, the only family she had ever known, and though she didn't remember it, in a way, Magnus had been too. Jace had often heard the warlock talking of Shadowhunters he had loved once; Christopher Lightwood, James Carstairs, Will Herondale, Jace's ancestor who, despite being told he wouldn't make it to nineteen, had lived till he was seventy-three. Clary should have had that chance and the reality that she wouldn't made Jace want to scream.

He sighed and grasped the redheads hand tighter, trying to ignore how much shallower her breathing had become. "What do we do now?" he asked. Clary laughed dryly, which resulted in a fit of coughing that made Jace's hair stand on end.

"We wait and pray I don't end up in hell."

"That's not funny."

"I'm not laughing." The serious tone of her voice stunned him. There had been times when he wondered if he would end up in hell for the things he had done; the secrets he had kept, the people he had killed. He hadn't done it to hurt anyone, not intentionally, but still. It hadn't occurred to him that Clary might have the same fears."Clary…." He meant to assure her that she would be fine, but she cut him off. "Tell me a story." "About what?" "About us." Her voice cracked and Jace's heart twisted painfully. What did he say? What were you _supposed_ to say in the last moments you had with the person you loved more than anything in the world? Jace had no idea.

After a moment, he cleared his throat. "I would have proposed at Christmas, when everyone was gone and it was just us and the moment was perfect. We would have been married in the spring in the greenhouse, when everything was in bloom and we would have spent our honeymoon traveling as many places as we could go. London, Scotland, Wales, wherever you wanted." Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Clary smile faintly and he fought to keep his voice steady.

"Our kids would come later, and we would have fought about stupid things like what color to paint the nursery and what their names would be…." he paused again, trying to stop the tears that were forming in his eyes. "They would take over the Institute for us when they were old enough and we would buy a house on the beach with a place where you could draw and I could train, a place that was solely ours, where we could spend our nights out on the porch watching the sunset over the water."

His tears fell freely now and they landed in her hair as he leaned forward to whisper, "I would have spent every moment of the rest of my life loving you, Clary Fray." Again she smiled. Her eyes had begun to drift closed and her breathing had become shallower and less frequent."It sounds perfect." Her voice was barely a whisper. "A lot different from the first story you ever told me. To love is to destroy and to be loved is to be destroyed." She took a gasping breath. "Don't go back to believing that. Remember this. Remember loving someone this much and find that again. You deserve to live that perfect life." "Clary…." He was about to tell her no, he was about to tell her that that life wouldn't be perfect without her in it, that it was the life he had imagined for them and only them, but she cut him off.

"Promise me." The ferocity in her voice was almost enough to make him laugh.

Almost.

He leaned up and kissed her forehead. "I promise."

"I love you so much," she said. "I love you too. _L'amour che move il sole e l'altre stele._ " Clary laughed weakly. "I still don't speak Italian."

And in that same moment, Jace watched as her eyes closed and her chest rose and fell, but did not rise again. And even though he knew it was over, he waited, he prayed that she would give him one last kiss, one last smile, one last chance. Just one more.

But she never did. And still, he remained where he was. He didn't stand, he didn't yell for someone to call the Silent Brothers. He simply sat, trying to memorize every detail of the girl he loved, then uttered the three words he had loathed since he learned them. The words that meant finality.

The words that meant goodbye.

 _Ave atque vale._

Hail and farewell.


End file.
